Friday, November 14, 2008

WoW add-on review Carbonite

While I love to get surprises and discover new zones, I also like to not waste time running to the wrong zone or fighting the wrong mob for a drop that I'll never get. About a few months ago I started to use a popular quest mod called Quest Helper. I mentioned this a few times here and it's in most cases a great help, in fact I would say that Quest Helper is one of my "must have" add-ons for WoW.

How help Quest Helper is I did noticed some problems. One issue was the "ant trails" paths that tell you were to go next. Usually this is helpful as it tells you a fast route to get your quests done then turn them in. Sometimes this can be a pain because the amount of ant trails starts to cover up your higher priority quests and adds to the confusion. You can adjust this in the configurations but it's a important note. Also many people have commented that Quest Helper takes up too much performance on the WoW client and your computer. Personally I haven't noticed a huge drop in performance but I only use Quest Helper and very few additional add-ons.

From reading forums I found another highly recommended add-on called Carbonite. Carbonite is actually similar to Quest Helper but has some nice features which I'll go into detail. First, Carbonite is not free, it's a add-on that has a subscription fee with will add additional features to Carbonite. It's important to know that Carbonite Quest is the free version, while I'm reviewing the subscription version Cabonite. The subscription fee is a reasonable $3 to $1 per month depending on the length of subscription.

The install process is very easy, you simply add this just like any any add-on, copy to the "add-on" folder and start WoW. You should also disable Quest Helper as this might cause problems for Carbonite. Once started I noticed that Carbonite changed my minimap from the default to a new larger square with added functions below. This was nice but I prefer to leave the map default, it's not a big deal. So I did a test to see how this compares to Quest Helper by running in the same zone I did with Quest Helper but this time with Carbonite.

One of the first things that I noticed was different is the more exact location of mobs and quest items. In Quest Helper the mobs locations are defined by a green fog, in Carbonite they are listed as more precise green or red blocks on the main map. Carbonite takes this a step further by showing the mob locations in detail on the minimap as well. I tested this by looking for mobs and crystals in Un'Goro Crater, surprised just how precise the map was to the loot items.

Tonight and this weekend I'll continue to quest further with Carbonite and also have Quest Helper running on the other account to see the difference.

No comments: